Peter Senge said, a learning organisation, “is continually expanding its capacity to create its future”.

Senge’s message is that organisations obtain competitive advantage (see article) from continuous learning, both individual and collective. Learning new ways of doing things, however, also necessarily involves a continuous process of unlearning, of forgetting old ways of doing things. The technology of the information age is radically changing the way in which such processes take place.

Senge rose to prominence with the publication in 1990 of “The Fifth Discipline”, the book in which he laid out his thoughts about organisational learning. There he described the five essential ingredients (“disciplines”) of the learning organisation:

1. Personal mastery—continuous learning by each individual, “expanding the ability to produce the results we truly want in life”.

2. Mental models—to develop awareness of the acquired patterns of thinking within organisations, and to constantly challenge them.

3. Shared vision—creating “pictures of the future” that all members of a group can identify as their own.

4. Team learning—learning together through dialogue and discussion so that the members of a team are more effective than they would be as solitary individuals.

5. The “fifth” discipline, the ability to see the organisation as a whole, as something with its own behaviour patterns separate from those of the individuals who are its constituent parts.

Organisations work as a set of interconnected sub-systems, says Senge, so decisions made in one part of the business have implications for the other parts.                                                              Managers, therefore, need to embrace the complexity of organisations rather than embracing what he calls “the pervasive reductionalism” of Western culture, whereby simple answers to complex questions are always sought. Senge says that a non-threatening dialogue needs to be carried out among the employees of an organisation in which some sort of consensus is reached as each employee comes to see the points of view of all the others, and begins to learn from them.